Decimal arithmetic, was Re: Python GUI app to impress the boss?

[Piet van Oostrum]

>>>>> Christian Tismer <tismer at tismer.com> (CT) writes:

CT> Greg Ewing wrote:
>> Christian Tismer wrote:
>> 
>>> And see how simple they built their positional
>>> system, using just two symbols:
>>> http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Babylonian_numerals.html
>> Although I suspect that scribes would quickly
>> have learned to recognise each "cluster" of
>> marks, drawn in a recognisable pattern,
>> as a single symbol, in which case there
>> were really 14 symbols (5 + 9).

CT> Right. Remarkably they did *lack a zero* !!!

They used an empty space for the zero. But I saw in a museum a tablet
where the scribe made a calculation error because he failed to notice this
"zero". 
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP]
Private email: P.van.Oostrum at hccnet.nl